STOP Ruining Black and Whites!

i've used affinity photo for years but i'm still learning new things recently i found out that i haven't been using the black and white adjustment correctly so today i want to share what i've learned with you so that we can all have better black and whites let's get started [Music] before we learn the right way to turn a photo black and white we first need to learn a little color theory and don't worry it's not going to be boring to help us learn i have a color card pulled up in affinity i'm also going to change the color wheel to hsl sliders now we can use this color picker to see the hue saturation and luminosity of each color on the far left we have pure black which has zero percent saturation and zero percent luminosity on the far right we have pure white which also has zero percent saturation but has one hundred percent luminosity and with each of the colors in the middle they have 100 saturation and 50 luminosity the only difference is what hue they have okay we'll come back to all of that in a second but for now i want to show you what happens when you apply a black and white adjustment to this color card but before i apply the adjustment i want you to imagine how you think all of these colors should look when they're turned black and white okay now let's see what affinity actually does do the results surprise you i know they surprised me but what's going on here why did dfinity turn all of the colors white the trick is to remember what i showed you earlier all of the colors had the exact same saturation and luminosity as far as affinity is concerned it doesn't matter that their hues are different if i select one of the rectangles and change its hue you'll see that nothing changes however if i change its saturation or luminosity then we'll see a difference but hold on a minute let's turn off the black and white adjustment and just look at the colors to me that blue seems way darker than that green but why does it look darker even though their saturation and luminosity are the same well the simple answer to that question is this we have weak human eyes scientifically these colors have the exact same level of brightness but as far as our eyes are concerned the blue will appear darker that's because the human eye is very sensitive to greens but not very sensitive to blues that's why blues look darker even when they really aren't as another example let's come to this portrait photo and apply a black and white adjustment as you can see her skin looks way too bright when the photo is converted to black and white technically affinity might not be doing anything wrong but it sure looks wrong okay so that's the problem we need to address but now the question is what can we do about it fortunately for us there were some really smart people that ran into this same problem and they already found the solution during the 1950s the world was beginning to switch from black and white tvs to color televisions obviously color tvs are great but as with any technology transition there was a hurdle to overcome if tv producers wanted to make their shows in color how could they also play those same colorful shows on a black and white tv without distorting all of the color's brightnesses as we've seen turning colors to black and white is not as straightforward as it might seem to solve this problem they came up with a formula to calculate the perceived brightness of a color based on rgb values the formula they came up with is this perceived brightness equals 30 red plus 59 green plus 11 blue these percentages take into account the fact that we see green as a very bright color red as a fairly bright color and blue as a dark color using this formula they could perfectly convert their color shows into black and white so that the shows could be broadcasted on all types of televisions okay so now that we know the magic formula how can we use our new knowledge in affinity first let's apply a black and white adjustment to the color card we know the default values this adjustment uses aren't correct but fortunately we can use the magic formula we just learned about i'll put the formula up on the screen so that we can reference it as we modify our adjustment layer based on the formula we know that red should be 30 percent so let's change our red slider to 30 percent but our next color is yellow which isn't included in the formula well as far as computers are concerned yellow is just red and green added together so using our formula we can add 30 red to 59 green to get 89 percent yellow next we'll use the formula to make the green 59 as for cyan that's just green and blue added together which is 70 percent next we'll set the blue to 11 and finally we'll add red and blue together to make 41 magenta perfect now that looks the way the colors should be when they're turned black and white and of course this new formula works perfect on regular photos too to see how it does i'll copy and paste this adjustment layer into our portrait photo as you can see it does a perfect job but as great as this formula is you're probably not going to remember all of the different values we used so to keep life simple we can turn this adjustment into a preset just open up the adjustment layer and select add preset then give it a name now this preset has been saved in our adjustments panel and we can easily apply it whenever we want as a small tip though the adjustments panel won't apply an adjustment if you already have that type of adjustment selected in the layers panel so just to show you that the preset works i'll delete our old black and white adjustment and then add the preset we created perfect and to save you some hassle i've included this color card file in the video description with the black and white adjustment already set up you'll just need to open the file and turn the adjustment into a preset you can also play around with the color card if you want to do more color experiments and remember getting your photo to look correct is only the first step to make a good black and white once you have a good starting point it's up to you and your artistic eye to turn the photo into a work of art now as one final tip for you i want to come back to the color card and show you another way of achieving a perfectly accurate black and white conversion remember how a black and white adjustment turned all of these colors white well look what happens when i desaturate the color card with an hsl adjustment it turns all of the colors gray that's pretty good but still not perfect however if i apply a vibrance adjustment and then decrease the saturation to zero percent our colors are perfectly converted to black and white you might be wondering why are the two saturation sliders different honestly i have no idea if you know the answer please leave a comment below with why this is however as simple as it was to apply a vibrance adjustment layer it doesn't give you the ability to tweak the lightness and darkness of each color for that reason i like to use the black and white preset we made earlier it gives us the correct starting point and then from there i can modify the colors until i like the way the photo looks well that wraps up this video i hope you learned something new and i'll see you in the next affinity revolution tutorial if you want to learn our affinity workflow then check out the free course below you

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 41,573

Keywords: affinity photo, tutorial, black and white

Id: gGZ7UV1I0xU

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 19 2020